Camping's Christian-centric apocalypse (from its Biblical source) and the claims of a Mayan one (from archaeological sources) are both are based on subjective astrology and numerology...meanings and numbers pulled out of thin air. How is that different (or less absurd) than ancient maps of monsters beyond the boundaries of the sea?

It's even worse. At least there are beasts in the sea worthy of inspiring monster tales.

liens could be as different from us as we are from insects or much more so. That's one of the huge imaginative failures of Roddenberry et al and of George Lucas. Way too many of the aliens are much too similar to humans, and the frequency with which cross-breeding and sexual attraction between alien species / beings from different planets occurs is just stupid

I kind of give Star Trek a break, for a few reasons:
-Star Trek was a TV show started in the 60s, when alien suits looked just awful.

-translation issues would be an even bigger problem but a show where every episode was a translation nightmare would be super boring.

-they worked some of this stuff out in Star Trek: Enterprise, where they get into translation stuff a bit and have far better aliens like the Xindi

They also redid green women in a pretty awesome way:

-who's to say that non-humanoid intelligent life is more likely than the humanoid kind? Parallel evolution in similar environments often leads towards similar things.

Other doomsday theories for the 21st include the idea that a planet called Nibiru is on a collision course with Earth, a total blackout for the planet due to the "alignment of the universe," solar storms and meteor strikes. NASA says none of these events is actually a possibility and does a case-by-case debunking.